10 Steps for Hosting a Standout Self Storage Investor Meetup

Announcer (00:03):

This is the Self Storage Podcast with the original Self Storage expert, Scott Meyers.

Scott Meyers (00:10):

Hello everyone and welcome to the Self Storage Podcast. I am your host, Scott Meyers, and on today’s solo episode, what we’re going to be going through is the 10 must haves, the 10 proper elements, the 10 must have elements to holding a successful Investor meetup. So what is an investor meetup? That is where we invite our passive investors, our limited partners who come alongside of us and invest in our syndicated projects or in our fund at a particular property to come out to the site to kick the tires to see if what we have talked about and what they’ve seen on the webinar if we’ve held it already is real. We invite all of our past investors who at least once come out and take a look at the facilities, the facility that they are investing in specifically, or if it’s within our fund, take a look at what it is that we’re doing, meet the boots on the ground, meet the rest of our staff, the C-suite, many times myself, the chief executive officer, the chief operations officer, as well as many of the folks that are on our upper level and mid-level management team will be out there at the sites at these investor meetups because as we know, it is more important for our investors to know and put their faith and trust in the jockey rather than the horse.

(01:23):

So it is always good to come out and take a look at the site, but we combine our investor meetups with the team so that our folks can meet exactly who it is that will be pulling the levers and making sure that we hit our marks and that we meet or beat our projections. And so this episode is for both active investors and passive investors because we’re going to talk to you a little bit about the ways in which we hold these very successful investor meetups. And this is a culmination of trial and error on our part. I feel that many times we are not, I wouldn’t say part showmen, but I have a gift of hospitality and I want to make sure that anybody who comes to any one of our academies, our training program events, our mastermind and our investor meetups that that they’re treated well, that we show that we put our best foot forward with regards to hospitality and that they have been over the top experience because that’s kind of the way that we do things anyway.

(02:15):

So I want them to see that not only behind the scenes that we are going above and beyond, but that they feel that and understand that at our live events and our meetups as well. So before we get into the 10 successful steps, I want to point you over to passive storage investing.com. So this is found within the self storage investing.com family. This is where all of our passive investments reside. So if you want to take a look at our past projects, our current projects that are open and available as we invite you to do that, because as we said before we we’re an open book, we’re very transparent and if you want an understanding of how we operate and how we do things well, we give you a window into doing that. Just follow what we do. So take a look over there@passivestorageinvesting.com and you can see just exactly what it is.

(03:00):

The examples that I’m going to provide. Now, you’ll see those projects that we’ve closed on already, that we’ve closed the funds on, and we’ve raised the capital for as well as another one of our projects, which is going to have an upcoming meetup in the very near future as well. So it puts a little bit of reference and background and context to what we’re going to be talking about today. So with that, I’m going to run through a list of 10 items that I think make up a successful investor meetup. And the first of which, like any business or any event that we do, you have to have a plan. First of all, what is the purpose, the plan, and the goal for the meetup itself. You can have a specific goal by identifying how much capital you need to raise and for what specific project, and then you tailor the meetup around this.

(03:41):

If you have a fund which you’re raising capital for, it doesn’t have to be in the city in which the facility, a particular facilities and that you’re raising capital for. It could be a central location or a location that is central to where many of your investors are located. The way that we do it is even if it’s in a fund, we’ve got another project that is coming up. It gives us another opportunity. We’re going to be on the ground anyway. We’re going to be going out for due diligence, we’re going to come back to sign agreements, meeting with the sellers, the brokers. There’s going to be many touch points that our team is going to be out there even before we close on a property. So on one of those meetings, we can schedule an investor meetup. There’s no reason not to. This isn’t a huge event with a stage and we don’t have to book a hotel or do anything elaborate.

(04:23):

We need to pick a date that works, pick a time that works, and then our investor meetups always are surrounded by the property, some that is the showpiece, and then our team, depending upon what day or what stage we are in of a due diligence and in the project, we’re going to try to pick a time in which most of our team is going to be out there on site anyway from our regional managers, our district managers, myself, the CEO, the COO, the transition team, whatever that looks like, and it doesn’t have to always be on the front end of a project. Sometimes we close on the property and we’re still raising capital afterwards even though we’ve got the loan that we’re still filling out the balance of the capital stack. And so we’ve already closed on it, we have access and the management team is already in place and we’re transitioning so our folks can come see once again how the sausage is made, what are secret sauces made up, and they can see just exactly how we transition these properties over and we look forward to these.

(05:15):

First of all, if we’re going out on site, we don’t like to have dinner alone, so we might as well have dinner with 10, 20, 30, 50 of our closest friends that are investors that are coming along alongside of us on our projects. It’s another touch touchpoint, another excuse, although it’s not an excuse and it’s an intentional excuse as to being able to get together with our folks up so that they can once again understand how we do things and get to know us a little bit better even if they haven’t invested with us yet. And then behind the specific goal for the event, we need to have a specific targeted audience and typically it’s folks that have maybe shown up on a webinar or maybe several webinars of ours in the past on projects but haven’t invested yet, and anybody that has already shown interest and or invested in this project so that they come out and see, touch and feel what it is that they’re investing in.

(05:57):

So it’s as broad as that. We don’t send an invitation out to our entire database, but once we put a project out, send an email out to our investors that may be interested in this project, those that have raised their hand in some way, shape or form by showing up for a webinar or at least pull some information down from the portal from our investor portal. Those are the folks that we’re going to invite out to the event. Number two is then creating a professional and engaging event. And it’s very important that it needs to be engaging as well, and that’s really the reason why we’re doing this is so that they can engage with us once again pointing back to the jockey, not necessarily or only the project itself. So there’s multiple ways of doing this and we’ve seen some syndicators and promoters that they won’t visit the site that they only do meetups in different parts of the country just so that they can have a touchpoint for their investors to get to know them and have a meeting in which they can meet the team, maybe show some renderings of a development project or pictures or share a PowerPoint deck on a project that they have upcoming or on several projects.

(06:55):

That’s one way of doing things. We’ve never done one in that fashion, although we do have a PowerPoint. We’re talking about our projects when we get together later, but ours always start at the site. It could be a blank slate, it could be a piece of dirt. We’re going to go out there and we’re going to tour the market. We’re going to tour the area and show them the reasons why we like this market or the facility, and then we’re going to go back to a hotel, we’re going to go back to a restaurant and we’re going to get together and have a dinner engage a little bit more. But before that, what we want to do is we want them to see what we saw in this facility or this project and the reasons why we like it, and that’s what they want anyways.

(07:33):

There’s many of these folks that are now passive investors that were active investors or they’ve never been active. They always wanted to be, but maybe they didn’t want to take on the debt risk and they didn’t want to take on a lease up risk or a development risk. And so they want to come out and see the things that we do as an active investor because it makes some better limited partners, it makes them better passive investors. And so that’s when we invite everybody out to the site first. So after we visited the site, we will go back to, we try to pick not a chain restaurant. We try to pick a nice high-end upscale restaurant and we try to do something a little special and engaging with our folks as well. One in particular, there’s a project, a portfolio that we were purchasing outside of Louisville, Kentucky in which we went to a very nice restaurant, upscale restaurant, and then we had a private bourbon tasting along with that.

(08:19):

So regardless of whether we have a lot of bourbon drinkers in there or not, it’s just one of the local things that we can do, and that’s a huge part of that market and a huge part of the economy and it was enjoyed by many folks. It’s fun when you get to partake in note what is unique to that particular city or that town and just make it a better experience, and if you do so, that’s also going to bring more folks out. And at the end of the day, we have seen that once folks get an opportunity to see the site and they’re getting a chance to either know us for the first time or know us better, we know that they may have had reservations before either about the project or about how much money they’re putting in, and that number either goes from to the minimum or goes from the minimum to a very large amount.

(08:59):

So these events, these investor meetups do pay off, so make it entertaining, make ’em fun, do something special other than just going to a site or just going to a hotel or to a restaurant for dinner. It’s also important to pick a date in a time that works well. So don’t do it around holidays. We do our best to do it on the weekends. Yes, these are professionals, but they also, many of them, they’re passive investors and so many of them have a nine to five or they own their own business, and so we make this available on the weekends. It could be a Friday evening, Friday afternoon, and then they stay over and you do a portion of it on Saturday. Ours are typically just a one day day that allows these investors to in the middle of the day, so they can be in and out.

(09:37):

We’ll have an early dinner and they can even catch a flight if they want to or they can stay the night in that town and fly out the next day if that is something they would like to do. But typically we hold these on a Saturday. Number three, add the meetup. You’re going to be handing out now the slicks, the brochures, the presentations, the offering memorandums. So you’re going to have these printed up and if you haven’t either created a PDF of not all the slides in your deck, but some of the slides, the most pertinent slides or if you’ve created, I suggest that I would recommend that you create an executive summary. It’s a two pager, it’s a three pager that you would hand out and then electronically they can get access to the full deck or a combination of both. You can have a two page executive summary.

(10:18):

You can have a printout of the PowerPoints that turned into A PDF and maybe exclude some of the slides so it’s not a 50 page, a 60 pager or if you’d like go ahead and print the 50 pager and let them see everything at the end of the day, they do need to have some materials on the front end so they know what they’re looking at and they’ve got all the information. It saves on some of the, I think the most important part of this is that it saves some of the elementary questions when we get out on site, like how many square feet are you going to build here? How many square feet are units? It’s all right there and it allows for them to ask the more poignant questions, the ones that the rest of the group wants to hear rather than just the basic ones, but be certain that you have those offering memorandums printed up.

(10:59):

They’re nice quality not on your home printer, nice thick quality sheet with a cover page, and then obviously it has your contact information and the call to action if you will, which for us is access the email access to get into the investor portal to pull down the rest of the due diligence documents along with that. Then a matching presentation once you get back to say a hotel room or a restaurant if you’re going to have a meeting room if necessary. We tended to not do this. We try to keep this a little higher level. For the most part, they’ve seen the webinar, they’ve seen the presentation by the time that we are doing a site visit, and so we’re going to give them that information. Again, most of that PowerPoint is going to show up in the brochures that we have on site, and so we’ll have dinner and then after dinner right before dessert or during dessert is when our team will then stand up and answer any other questions that came up during the day that we didn’t answer on site after the tour or as a result of the conversation at dinner to make sure that all questions are answered.

(12:02):

And it also gives us an opportunity to ask once again because when you ask the folks in the room who’s on board, is there anything else that you don’t like? See, do we have any other questions? Is there any other reason that you are not interested in this project or some type of question leading towards that? Well then either what’s stopping you or who’s in or We’ve only got a few slots left, not cheesy, but there should be a professional push at this point. And what happens though collectively when you ask the question who’s in now or who’s going to invest more after what they’ve seen today? When the hands go up, then the crowd tends to typically go along with those folks that are excited and that are looking to do more because there’s confirmation for those folks in the room. So make that your own, not a cheesy pitch.

(12:45):

Whatever works for you, what you’re comfortable with, and you don’t have to at the end of the day, but we find once we have them there, that allows us whatever we have left usually to raise on a project once we end up going to the investor meetup, we usually end up oversubscribed as a result of these, and so it doesn’t hurt to ask while they are there. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it, and this is also a time to stand up and talk about your team and really brag upon the team as well as going back in through your successful projects that you’re experiencing right now, that you’re exiting right now or the past projects that you’ve done and just from the front of the room that they can hear that they can hear you talk about the portfolio that you currently have, how well it’s doing and or past projects.

(13:29):

Once again, just adding more legitimacy in the room and just batting all the i’s and crossing all the T’s so that they leave there with again, no questions unanswered and really no reason for them to say no to not invest in this particular project. So now that we have all the materials presented, we’ve got a date picked, obviously the location, it’s important to promote the event to make sure that we have the people in the room that are interested in investing in this project, and we do this individually. This isn’t by a mass email, although we do that as well. However, this, if we really want to get some traction, then a personal invitation goes out to the folks again that have shown up for the webinars or perhaps some folks that have invested with us in multiple projects in the past and for whatever reason they haven’t engaged on this one, we will send a personal invitation out to them as well.

(14:14):

And this could be for a thank you if they are close to the area or if they still want to fly out for them to be able to see a project to go to a nice dinner to partake in any activity that we may have planned alongside of this. And once again, just another touch point with our team if they would like to do so, and it’s an opportunity for those folks that have invested with us in the past to be able to stand in the front of the room and we may call on them either to the front of the room or just call out to them to comment on some of the projects that they’ve invested in the past, especially the successful ones that we have purchased or developed that we’ve grown, stabilized, optimized, and then exited. And especially where we’ve beaten our projections and returned even more to those investors.

(14:55):

Those are the types of folks that we want to have in the room so that the rest of the folks can say, wow, well if he did it, okay, here is a referral right here that I can go talk to after this event and find out what the experience was working with Scott and his team. Then along with that, we are going to be sending emails out to the folks in our database about passive investors, letting ’em know that there is an investor meetup coming out to this property. So even if they didn’t attend the webinar for this project, they may be interested in this and then dig in a little bit further along with our online presence. So we are going to put ads and notices up on Facebook, on LinkedIn and making sure that people know specifically stating for our passive investors, even if they’re not, then they’re going to find out about it and if anything, what this does is it just attracts attention to our company to what it is that we do.

(15:40):

We’re having a meetup. Even if they don’t have a personal invitation, they have no interest. It’s once again another one of those touch points online experientially that these folks will be able to see that our name is out there. Again, some of the things that we’re doing, and from what we’ve seen recently, there are fewer and fewer companies, sponsors that are doing this, especially in the multifamily space and some of the others that are really hurting. Now, as we head into this recession and challenging times and where interest rates are rising and operational costs have all gone up, I’ve got many folks, many friends that are in the multifamily space and assisted living in mobile home parks and they’re struggling and so they’re having to cut back and there are fewer and fewer of these investor meetups being done by the sponsors and promoters in the other asset classes, whereas we’re still out there doing what we’re doing in self storage and so our other self storage folks as well.

(16:30):

But the good news is then is that there’s less traffic, there’s less noise for folks that are out there doing this. And so another reason why we double down and make sure that we are also paying for ads, especially if it is a 5 0 6 C, and we have the ability to promote this offering. So I already sent you to passive storage investing.com, so you can take a look at our offerings, but now we have a specific page, it’s a squeeze page, a landing page for folks that are interested and we send them to passive investor meetup.com. So anytime that we have a meetup coming up, we send them over by way of email or our ads to passive investor meetup.com. Feel free to go over there. For those of you that are syndicators and sponsors have at it, feel free to utilize, pull down any ideas that you find it useful out there and for the folks that are looking to invest with us, well the details are out there so you can understand just exactly what this looks like and what to expect.

(17:21):

So on November 13th in Orlando, we will be having our next investor meetup, and that is where my entire team will be, so it gives an opportunity for our passive investors to meet the team. We’ll be talking about the next project and the upcoming projects that we have. It’s a good time to do so as a winner sits in folks in the Midwest that are interested in these projects. An opportunity and or an excuse to get down to Orlando and is one of the bigger investor meetups that we have when we do these in Orlando. Again, because the team is already down there. So if you want to see how we do it and the invitations that they go out and what it looks like to schedule one of these and just go to passive investor meetup.com and you can reverse engineer what we’ve got there.

(17:58):

And for those that are interested in investing with us passively, well there’s your invitation. Number five is to make sure that you structure the event for maximum engagement. We want our passive investors to hang out and talk with each other. They’re there for a reason and that’s because of us. They’re drawn to us and they’re drawn to our returns and what we’ve done, the fact that we’ve been out there in the marketplace doing this for, we’ve been in storage for over 20 years now in real estate for 30 and we we’ve had quite a following over those years and we brought a whole lot of folks up through the ranks by way of teaching them how to invest in self storage from active investors to passive investors and everything in between. Those that were active and now become passive and vice versa. This is an opportunity for them to be able to share their experience, not only in the industry but with our firm as well.

(18:43):

We’ll have a registration time or a check-in time and always have refreshments out there for them. We don’t know where they’re coming from. It’s just a hospitable thing to do. Anyway, so having a water, sodas, coffee, you name it, a wide variety of snacks, sometimes some hot finger food, and then we leave that about an hour for that time to register for the tour, and then we go on the tour of the site. It could be again of the piece of ground, it could be the facility that will be guided by someone who has an intimate knowledge of the project. So it could be our project manager, it could be the construction, our GC and head of the construction management or the project manager that’s going to be on that site if it’s a conversion project. Same thing, our construction company, maybe the broker. So they give a little bit of history on the background of this industrial building or this warehouse or this grocery store and how this all came to pass.

(19:29):

And then our operations team and our own internal project managers will talk specifically about the project and many of these folks, some of these folks are interested, many of these folks aren’t interested in all the details. And so our time at the site is typically an hour and a half, two hours usually with questions there that are at the site. Then we give them some time to hang around if they have any specific questions, another hour. And then depending upon where we’re going and how far we have to travel to the restaurant to the gathering back to a hotel and that has a room that is designated for a meal and for us, we give them time so that they can either, if they’re going to check into a hotel, they have time to do so or anything else for that matter or to hang out at the site, give about an hour and a half in between.

(20:13):

Most of that time they will all hang out and just talk with each other and they’ll talk at the site getting any other questions answered. Then when they show up at the site, again, we have a cocktail hour with appetizers that last for about an hour before dinner and we schedule an early dinner typically. So the day usually looks like a meeting somewhere around one o’clock on site. We don’t serve lunch, and so we meet at about one o’clock. We do have appetizers and drinks, they’ve got about till two o’clock for that reception time, two to three or so is the tour they’ve got from three 30 to four 30 to do whatever that they need to do. And then we’re usually meeting at the hotel at about five o’clock for a reception. They have cocktails or so from five to five 30 or six.

(21:00):

Then we have dinner and then a wrap up. So they can either get a late flight out if need be or to say at their hotel. That is a typical day. That is a typical schedule that we would hold at these investor meetups. And just as a reminder, make sure that you keep the floor open for a lengthy q and a and be transparent and if there are issues, if there are challenges and if they raise them, the thing you don’t want to do is to continually say, well, let me get back to you, or we’re still addressing that you need to have an answer. If there’s a few that you need to get back to them on, that’s fine, but then folks may begin to think that you’re hiding something or that you don’t know the project well. So just be open and transparent about any of the challenges and bring them up upfront even if it’s something that you think is going to be minor, make a bigger deal out of it.

(21:42):

We want to make sure that everybody knows going into this that not everything is 100% smooth. It doesn’t always go to plan, but that you just let them know that upfront and they’ll see that. They’ll understand that when if you are 100% open and transparent and confident and confident that you’re going to have challenges, that also goes a long ways for getting these folks to come on board with you. Okay, so number six. Another way of building trust and confidence is by bringing in some outside consultants. And so you don’t want to be the only one there or you don’t want to have just a partner there or your partner and a manager. The more folks you have, the better. But they’re also the third party folks. So we do bring in the brokers, so we bring in the general contractors. If you have a consultant by chance, if they happen to be close and they’ve done the feasibility study, it never hurts to bring in the team.

(22:27):

If you’re going to have a third party management company that’s going to management, they’ve already done a budget on this, have them talk about the projections and the budget and how they expect this to lease up and the timeframes. So bring as much credibility as you can. Invite as many people that will show up, pay them if you want to or reimburse ’em for their travel or at the very least let them enjoy a nice dinner and this experience that’s come out on site so that our folks can see that you have a team built around you. But what happens is they’re also going to go over and they’re going to come alongside of your third party vendors, your attorneys, property management companies, consultants that you have on site, and they’re going to say, Hey, what’s it like to work with Scott? Does they already do what they say?

(23:07):

Do they always do what they say? Do they always pay on time? Is there anything that they sugarcoated? Is there anything else that I need to know about this project that Scott and his team didn’t mention from the front of the room? And by having those folks in the room, it shows once again, we have nothing to hide and we got a strong team behind us. So it’s not just the Scott show, it’s not just the Bill and Sally show. So just be certain that as much as you can bring your team along with you to add credibility and once again, confidence, building confidence into this event as well so that folks that gives them, once again, no reason not to invest with you. Number seven, provide a clear call to action. That is the professional push that I mentioned. You clearly outline how the investors can get involved and tell them what the next steps are and walk through and also their expectations.

(23:49):

For us, it is do your due diligence. The next step for you to do now is to not just go and sign on the data line or go speak with our investor relations department. It is to log into the portal into our investor portal, pull down the due diligence documents. And by the way, we put up all our due diligence documents, so all of our calculations, site visits, pictures, everything is there for them to see so that as a passive investor, they’re looking at the exact same things and formulating a decision to move forward as a passive investor as we are looking at as an active investor. So we make all of that information available to them so they can look at and make an informed decision before they invest with us. And we are certain to have everybody sign in with their contact information even though we had it, we already given them the information we want to know and log that they were there and then even put a schedule alongside of that to say, when would you like a follow up call?

(24:38):

Would you like to talk to Keith right now? He’s right over there. If you have any further questions, who do I talk to about this? Make sure you have, if you can, one of your investor relations representatives present on site so that they can answer any questions they may have about moving funds from their self-directed IRA custodian or their real estate 401k or any of just the logistics of moving their money around and getting involved in this project. And that also includes creating a sense of urgency in a deadline for them to invest for whatever reason, not an excuse and not a false deadline, but a true deadline to say, we expect this to close by this date, or we have to close and we need the funds by this date, or we’ve closed on the project, but now we’re going to top off the balance of the fund and we’ve got another 400,000 to go, another a hundred thousand to go.

(25:22):

So we’ve got room for 2, 3, 4 investors or one if they write a check for X, whatever that is, create a sense of urgency and let ’em know when the funds have to be in and when you’re going to close the fund and that date should match your operating agreement. Number eight is the post event. Follow-up any campaign, and this is not a sale, but everybody knows that any successful sale, any successful celebration that you have in business when business is consummated only happens after multiple touches and after multiple follow-up appointments or multiple follow-up sessions. So you must continue to follow up with these folks. And what we found many times, whether that’s you, if you’re just beginning to syndicate and bring in passive investors into your projects, it’s going to be you. And many times there’s a fear of, oh, I don’t want to bother them and I’ve already given them five calls and they haven’t responded.

(26:14):

Every excuse that you want to create because you’re not comfortable picking up the phone and being told no or not getting anywhere again or that the funds aren’t coming in. But the average touches for any sale, and this goes true without many of our investors, if they haven’t invested with what us in the past, if they’re new to are ecosystem, it’s seven touches, phone calls, webinars, coming out to the site visit, asking questions, working with our investor relations. That holds true for this type of an investment as well. So there’s nothing wrong with following up. And as a matter of fact, the fortunes are in the follow-up. That’s how you are able to be able to fill up your funds to be able to fill up these investments is in the follow-up. That’s the only way it happens. They’re not just going to watch a webinar and just wire funds.

(26:56):

It doesn’t happen that way. This takes a little more, we’re talking about larger dollar amounts and it’s going to take a little bit more handholding on your end and a little more comfort and a higher comfort level for these folks to be able to invest with you. And many times what I’ve found in our investor relations department finds is that sometimes we know people get busy and they just forget. And Julie, I’m glad you called today. I’ve been meeting with the funds over. Can you just help me with that? Can you just share your screen? Can I share my screen? Here’s what I’m running into. Do you have any experience with X, Y, Z custodian and their trust because I’m having trouble picking this investment. And our investor relationships department is really good at that. And just helping people move money around and making it easy.

(27:36):

And sometimes that’s all it takes. And they’ve got 50,000, a hundred thousand, 300,000, yeah, but we need to invest in, I haven’t had the time or I got stuck with this one little piece of either your portal or pulling some money, pulling a document down or making this transaction happen. They just need some handholding. So you may be pleasantly surprised when you give them a call as to what it is that it was holding them up when you think it may be something bigger. And that includes those folks that didn’t show up. You send them a thank you as if they did, you send them a thank you and an update as to how well the meetup went and show pictures of it. And we’re pretty much done. I think we’re fully committed. We’ve got a little ways to go. There’s maybe some room for one more investor, but here’s what we found on site.

(28:22):

And here’s another thing that’s good about this project that we just got a lower bid for this, and so the returns are going to be even higher. Whatever that looks like, create another reason. Another, we don’t want to call it again, excuse to reach out to these folks, but it is another reason and I’ll be being 100% transparent. This is one of the reasons why we do the meetups. Some of these are attended greatly. Others, we’ve had a handful show up. There was one because of the location I think, and very early on in the project, it was just an old ugly industrial building. And we held it on a Tuesday. It was during the day. It was the only time that we could get together with the CEO, with our director of finance and also the regional manager. So we held it during this day and we only had a handful of folks that show up.

(29:07):

It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t successful, but just we would typically like to see a few more people than that. However, we gathered all the people together for the picture and we talked about what a great meeting this was and the questions that came up talked about all the positives. And once again, it’s just another reason to be able to show that, hey, we’re out there doing this and anytime you want to kick the tires and take a look at the project and meet the team that’s going to drive the performance that you saw on your shiny offering memorandum, then we invite you to do so because this is who we are and this is what we do. And these consistent updates continue to build long-term trust in your folks even if they haven’t invested with you yet. Number nine is then to send them the deck and invite them to watch the replay to engage in the video.

(29:53):

We shoot video when we are out there at the site and piece that together into a commercial, if you will, for that project. And some of the things that we looked at, including sound bites along the way, but engage with them. Send them everything including updates so that they have the opportunity once again, have it in their hands. It’s another reminder, even if you give ’em the paper company and they shoved it somewhere and then they’re inadvertently or intentionally drop the paper from their backpack to make it lighter when they got on the plane, they have it again. So they have all the information at their fingertips to be able to review once again and to be able to ask any other questions and ultimately to invest. Don’t forget the call to action to invite them to their investor portal and show them the ways in which they can wire the funds to be a part of this incredible project that you have for them.

(30:37):

And number 10, it is very important to make sure that everything is papered over and that your attorney has approved everything. And yes, this doesn’t necessarily tie into the investor meetup per se, but run into this enough again recently where we got a whole lot of folks out there that we’ve seen that are raising capital and they don’t have a private placement memorandum set up. They haven’t contacted an SEC attorney and they’re trying to skirt the rules and the laws just because people are good friends or family and they’re investing as partners that doesn’t fly two or more people that are investing in a venture in which one is active and one is passive. That is a security by definition from the SEC. And so there’s no really getting around it, nor do you want to try to, and there is no gray area and there is no three strike rule.

(31:18):

So by the time you show up for an investor meetup, the operating agreement has been blessed. You’ve dotted i’s and crossed t’s on the executive summary and certainly the private placement memorandum and subscription agreement, everything is up to snuff, has been blessed and approved final copies by your SEC attorney, not your real estate attorney, but by your SEC attorney. Everything has been registered and you are ready to begin accepting funds and everything is hopefully uploaded in your investor portal or at the very least that you or your investor relations representative has everything in one specific location to be able to pull from and in one specific location for all the investors to then send that information back to. I can’t stress that enough because this is a one and done game if you do this incorrectly. So make sure that when you show up to the investor meetup and all of the communications and all of the documentation that you send over to the old investors has been vetted and completed by your SEC attorney.

(32:11):

Now I have seen, and we have also had an investor meetup in which we haven’t had the final budget, the construction budget completed and therefore the final underwriting hasn’t been completed on the project to show the returns. That means that not all the documents have been completed. And you can do this, but I would suggest that you’re 80 to 90% of the way there and giving a range if you’ve already had a webinar or however you invite folks and get them interested in this project that you’ve got most of the material in there and all you’re waiting on is one last piece to be able to finalize everything and with the documents and the actual figures that are going to be included in the ultimate offering memorandum and the completed agreements. But it’s not critical to have everything done 100%, but it sure makes life a lot easier if it already is.

(32:58):

So that rounds out the 10, what I would say, essential elements for a successful investor meetup. Couple of additional tips, call it, cater in. Don’t try to do this anywhere else and make sure it’s a caterer you can do. And I’ve actually been to a couple in which they had like a pasta bar or they’ve had one of the Mexican places coming, and that’s okay if you want to do that for lunch, but I wouldn’t do it for the main dinner. Certainly you need to step it up a little bit more than that, but at the very least, it needs to be a relaxed atmosphere and a place where people can talk. And I would also strongly suggest that if you have a videographer, bring them.

(33:37):

If you don’t, then hire somebody locally that’s going to stream this and or record it so that people can go back and either watch this live, I suggest recording it and then putting it together, editing it and putting it together so that people can understand and hear what was said. When you’re standing in the front of the room at dinner, some of the questions that were asked at the site, some of the important ones, film all of it and pull out the important ones. And then as you’re going through the site tour of just the site itself or the facility or the industrial building that is set for conversion, that you’re hitting the highlights and so that people can visually experience what it was like to be there on site even if they couldn’t be there. Another pro tip dress like a pro, it’s okay to wear branded logo.

(34:23):

I suggest still depending upon the weather, even if it’s hot, we’re wearing a suit, we’ve got jackets and we are dressed up. We are not playing the part, but we are professional at the end of the day. We’re a financial services company that deploys capital people’s retirement capital in real estate, in self-storage. And so we tend to look more like a relaxed banker than we do a dressed up self-storage investor. You get the picture. So we not only play the part, but we dress the part and we make sure that these folks are putting a lot of faith and trust in us in a lot of their retirement and investment dollars with us. So we need to play the part and be sure that your team does the same. So we could go on and on about how we’ve been doing this successfully for the past 15 years because I feel quite honestly folks that our team does this better than anybody else.

(35:09):

And that’s the reason why with our track record as well, that we’re able to fill up our syndications and our funds out quicker than most of the folks out there so that we can roll more projects out through. And that only comes from a lot of experience. And you’ve heard me say this before and I’ll say it again. If you’re looking to raise capital, somebody’s looking to come alongside of you. They want to the private, the soldier wants to follow the general in the battle that has a limp. And if you can, as much as possible, share your experience and how well you’ve done and how you’ve mitigated challenges that you in the past and show and express your track record, that is what is going to make the biggest difference. And so what you’re seeing here and what you’ll see if you decide to come to one of our meetups is truly a very professional, well-oiled machine that has been doing this just about better than anybody else out there in the marketplace.

(35:53):

And that’s the reason why we continue to share this information because as you, the leader, the syndicator gets better, the business gets better, your company gets better, and so does your staff, and so does the industry. And it makes it easier and less friction for all of us. And so that is our goal here at selfstorageinvesting.com is once again to continue to contribute and make this industry the best it can possibly be. That is the mantle that we take up. And it’s been a pleasure to be able to share with you just one small piece and how we successfully handle these investor meetups so that you can go out and raise capital like a pro as well. So with that, we’ll be looking forward to seeing you on the next episode. Until then, take care.

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